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Airstrike by U.S. Draws Protests From Pakistanis

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jan. 14 - Pakistan's government on Saturday condemned a deadly American airstrike on a village in the northwestern tribal region, and a senior Pakistani security official said he was confident that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the No. 2 leader of Al Qaeda and the target of the strike, had not been in the village when it was hit.

In a statement, the Foreign Ministry condemned the loss of civilian lives and said it had delivered an official protest to the American ambassador in Islamabad. The information minister, Sheik Rashid Ahmed, said in Islamabad that the government wanted "to assure the people we will not allow such incidents to reoccur," The Associated Press reported.

Local officials in the Bajaur district, where the airstrike happened, said 18 civilians had been killed in the attack, including six children. But the senior Pakistani official who spoke of Mr. Zawahiri suggested that the death toll was higher, and he said that at least 11 militants had been killed in the attack. Seven of the dead were Arab fighters, and another four were Pakistani militants from Punjab Province, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the news media.

American and Pakistani officials have said the American airstrike, on the village of Damadola, was believed to have been carried out in the early morning hours on Friday by a remotely piloted Predator aircraft armed with missiles.

On Saturday, a Central Intelligence Agency spokesman declined to comment on any raid that might have taken place. The agency is known to operate armed Predator aircraft, but the missions remain classified and are not generally acknowledged by the C.I.A.

The White House had no immediate comment, said a spokesman, Blair Jones.

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan mentioned the attacks during a meeting on Saturday with officials from the town of Sawabi, according to a local reporter. He was quoted as saying: "We are looking into it, as to who has done it. We are looking into it, that there were people who came from outside."

Thousands of tribesmen, led by a local parliamentarian, protested the killings on Saturday, chanting anti-American and anti-government slogans in the town of Khaar, the central administrative center of Bajaur.

After the rally dispersed, 800 to 900 men went on a rampage and attacked the offices of two nongovernmental organizations in the town, according to the local Pakistani reporter. People in the crowd looted computers from an American-financed aid organization called BEST and then torched the compound. The office of an Italian aid group, Intersos, was smashed and looted before the authorities intervened.

On Saturday, the Pakistani security official described some of the intelligence surrounding the airstrike. He said that a dinner at which Mr. Zawahiri was expected had been planned for Thursday night. A local cleric, Maulavi Liaqat, was at the dinner, but he left around midnight, the official said.

After the airstrike, Mr. Liaqat was again at the scene, and he had the bodies of the Arab militants pulled from the rubble and taken away, the security official said. A second cleric, Maulavi Atta Muhammad, took away the Pakistani militants, he said.

A second American official who acknowledged that Mr. Zawahiri had been the target of the strike said it was probably too soon to know for certain whether he had been at the scene. The American official acknowledged that intelligence was often imperfect, and said that American operations in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region reflected a continuing, intensive effort to track down Mr. Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden and their followers.

In a radio interview last month, Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, retired, head of the National Counterterrorism Center, declined to discuss the raids in detail but said "there's an awful lot of pressure" on senior Qaeda leaders. "Whenever there's pressure, which means the more you talk, the more you move, the more you do anything, the more vulnerable you become," he said.

Admiral Redd also pointed out in the interview that Mr. bin Laden had not made a public statement in more than a year and said "there are a lot of theories" as to what that might mean. He declined to elaborate.

Pakistan has not granted American forces in Afghanistan the right to cross the border, even in pursuit of militants. President Musharraf has made a point of highlighting Pakistani security efforts to hunt down militant figures taking shelter in the lawless northwestern tribal region, but American officials have expressed frustration with a lack of progress.

Pakistan's government announced a potentially huge victory in the effort in March 2004, saying Mr. Zawahiri had been surrounded in a battle between Pakistani soldiers and militants in the tribal region. But the government later backed away from the statement, and within days there was a new taped message said to be from Mr. Zawahiri, calling for President Musharraf's ouster.

The hunt for Mr. Zawahiri has heated up again during the past six months and has been focused on the Bajaur district, the senior Pakistani official said. Unlike Mr. bin Laden, who has stayed out of public view, Mr. Zawahiri has been vocal, releasing several videotapes and audiotapes with messages for his followers and containing threats of further attacks on Western interests. He is also thought by intelligence officials to move around the region more than Mr. bin Laden does, making him somewhat less difficult to track.

Mr. Zawahiri has a wife who is a Pashtun from the Mohmand tribe and he has been known to visit her and their two children at the home of his father-in-law on the border between the districts of Bajaur and Mohmand, the official said. He is also known to have visited different parts of Bajaur where Arabs and other militants are active in training and mounting insurgent operations across the border into Afghanistan.

In Damadola, the village hit by the missiles, a local member of Parliament, Sahibzada Haroon Rashid, said he saw a drone aircraft surveying the area hours before the attack and was later awakened by huge explosions.

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He said three houses had been hit by the airstrikes. "The houses have been razed to the ground," said Mr. Rashid, who said he had visited the scene. "There is nothing left. Pieces of the missiles are scattered all around. The impact of the explosions have been huge. Everything has been blackened in a 100-meter radius."

Damadola has been the focus of previous security operations as well. The Pakistani authorities carried out an operation in the village in April 2004 against a cleric, Maulavi Faqir Mohammad, whom they blamed for giving sanctuary to militants. He has been at large since, but turned up Friday and spoke at the funeral of the civilian dead, denouncing the strike, local residents said. He left the area immediately afterward.

In a speech he gave to townspeople in Sawabi, President Musharraf warned that aiding militants was dangerous.

"If we harbor foreign terrorists, those who carry out bomb blasts throughout the world, then remember that our future is not good," he said. "People should not side with foreign militants," he said. "They should tell us about them so we take action against them," he said.

He did not directly criticize the United States for the attack, and it was left to the Foreign Ministry to protest the infringement of sovereignty. "Our armed forces have undertaken large-scale operations against the foreign militants, and it remainsour responsibility to protect our people and territory from outside intrusion," the ministry said.

The statement was the second in two weeks in which the Pakistani government has condemned what was thought to be an American attack on its soil. Eight people, including women and children, were reported killed Jan. 7 when missiles destroyed the house of a local cleric in North Waziristan close to the Afghan border. Pakistan lodged a strong protest with coalition forces on Monday, but said it was still investigating whether the missiles had been fired from Pakistani airspace or from Afghan territory.

In December, a man that American officials identified as Al Qaeda's operations commander, Hamza Rabia, was killed in North Waziristan by what witnesses said was a missile fired by a remotely piloted aircraft. The C.I.A. also refused to comment on that attack.

There have been a number of incidents of civilian deaths in failed or misdirected American attacks in Afghanistan and along the border with Pakistan.

In one in December 2003, nine children and a 25-year-old man were killed in a strike from a Predator in Hutala, a village in a remote area of southern Ghazni Province. The intended target, a Taliban supporter who was suspected of being behind several attacks on foreign aid and construction workers, was not among the dead and may have not been in the village at the time.

The American military command expressed regret for the killings and sent officers to the village to apologize. President Hamid Karzai said he was "profoundly shocked" and demanded that the United States forces coordinate their attacks with the Afghan government in the future.

Ex-Taliban Official Is Killed

KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 14 (AP) -- Two gunmen on a motorcycle killed a former Taliban leader on Saturday outside his home in Kandahar, police officials said.

The victim, Mullah Abdul Samad Khaksar, was a deputy interior minister under the Taliban government in Afghanistan. He switched loyalties and supported Afghanistan's American-backed government after the Taliban militia was ousted in late 2001.

The Kandahar police chief, Gen. Abdul Wahid, said Mullah Khaksar was shot in the heart and head as he was walking with two of his children.

A Taliban spokesman, Qari Muhammad Yusuf Ahmadi, said the group had killed Mullah Khaksar because he was a traitor and said the same fate awaited other turncoats.

Mullah Khaksar was one of a number of former Taliban leaders who have changed sides. The government has encouraged Taliban members to go through a formal reconciliation program. So far, about 300 rank-and-file members and about 50 senior officials have done so.

In other violence blamed on holdouts from the former Taliban government, two bomb blasts ripped through crowds of civilians in eastern Khost province on Saturday as residents were celebrating Id al-Adha, the Islamic feast of sacrifice, said a local doctor, Amir Pacha Ramatzi. One person was killed and 40 were wounded, he said.

A suicide car bombing on Saturday targeting an American-Afghan military convoy in southern Helmand province wounded an American soldier, said a local police chief, Khan Mohammed. An American military spokesman said the soldier was hospitalized and in stable condition.

Douglas Jehl contributed reporting from Washington for this article, Mohammad Khan contributed from Peshawar, Pakistan, and Salman Massod from Islamabad.